“Anno 1741: A Historical Novel of Emigration from the Palatinate to Pennsylvania”

Actually, Sylvia Koppermann just wanted to know more details about the life of her beloved grandmother so that she could better tell her children the history of the family. But the genealogical research of the 52-year-old author, who has always lived in Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the Upper Harz Mountains, did not result in a bedtime story for her children, but in a 200-page historical novel that has now been published: “Anno 1741 – Foreign Home” is the name of the work. The result is an extremely successful mixture of fiction and documentation, because all the people who appear in the book actually lived, and she meticulously compiled all the data and facts over years of detailed work in many archives. It is about the story of about 180 people who wanted to emigrate from the Palatinate to Pennsylvania in America in the spring of 1741 for fear of religious oppression, but only made it as far as Schenkenschanz because they ran out of money. Pennsylvania became Pfalzdorf.